Bad press.(Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib)(Book Review)

Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, by Seymour M. Hersh (HarperCollins, 370 pp., $25.95)

THIS side of Dan Rather, no one has more cause for concern about fallout from CBS's scandalous document hoax than Seymour Hersh. For no journalist has benefited more from the decades-old jerry-rigged system of American news reporting now being razed before our eyes.

It was a cozy arrangement. A precious few titans--called the "mainstream" media, though there was little mainstream about them--anointed themselves arbiters of the "objective" and the "responsible." Objective was a veneer of just-the-facts-ma'am rigor, hiding a supernumerary lens implacably programmed to align selected facts with certain preordained "truths": American strength bad, European piety good, individual initiative dangerous, government social activism desirable, and so on. Responsible, in turn, was the process of bolstering this "objectivity" with analysis from dependable sources, trusted to go along with the program and transformed into superstar pundits for doing so.

Only through such an arrangement could Seymour Hersh have thrived. In lionizing this Pulitzer Prize winner, the "mainstream" has honored itself. How fitting, then, that Hersh's new book, Chain of Command--derived from his Bush-bashing post-9/11 reports for The New Yorker--arrives just as Rather's blogging nemeses have removed the last stitch of the emperor's clothes.

By any truly objective standard, Hersh is a terrible reporter. Real reporting plays it straight and gets it right, and the reader simply can't trust him to do either. Hersh is a hard-left ideologue who disdains facts that collide with his dark theories. His methodology, moreover, is a joke. As has been ably recounted by NATIONAL REVIEW's John J. Miller and others, Hersh's most important sources are anonymous and impossible to verify, while the few sources he does identify tend to be conmen or the transparently agenda-driven. His journalistic practices have been decried by his former New York Times editor, A. M. Rosenthal, and embarrassingly laid bare by his own admissions, in court testimony, about concocting elaborate deceptions to pry out dubious information.

More fundamentally, Hersh gets even easily verifiable details wrong. And, as long as a story-hawker is playing to his prejudices, he has proved spectacularly gullible. Indeed, were it not for some rudimentary due diligence by ABC News--the kind CBS recently eschewed--Hersh might have beaten Rather to phony-document infamy when, in the course of compiling his roundly discredited account of the Kennedy presidency (The Dark Side of Camelot), he was taken in for months by forgeries trumpeting salacious gossip about JFK and Marilyn Monroe.

Nevertheless, as long as they were the only game in town, the mainstream media could present Hersh as a respectable raconteur instead of a hyper-partisan. In fact, at The New Yorker, they still think they can: Chain of Command begins with a cloying introduction by Hersh's current editor, David Remnick, who burnishes the legend, elides any hint of the innumerable gaffes, and conveniently explains that, of course, Hersh can't be expected to name his sources, but you can bet the ranch on their credibility because, after all, this is The New Yorker we're talking about.